Ryan Petrello is a Senior Principal Software Engineer with 16 years of experience building and scaling cloud-native and automation platforms, currently working on AI platform core components at Red Hat. He has deep expertise in backend systems, DevOps automation, and open-source stewardship—having led the transition of Ansible Tower to the AWX community and contributed to widely used projects like Celery and Ansible Runner. Ryan combines hands-on engineering with people leadership, having architected and led cross-functional teams for enterprise SaaS and cloud services at Red Hat, CDW, DreamHost, and others. He’s comfortable across the stack from packaging and build provenance to API integrations and release/security coordination, and is known for pragmatic improvements that reduce operational friction (e.g., broker/transport option refactors and robust Tower integration tests). Based in Atlanta, he brings a rare mix of long-term open-source maintainer experience and product-driven delivery at scale.
16 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at University of West Georgia
A tool and python library that helps when interfacing with Ansible directly or as part of another system whether that be through a container image interface, as a standalone tool, or as a Python module that can be imported. The goal is to provide a stable and consistent interface abstraction to Ansible.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
Contributions:16 reviews, 35 commits, 30 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily contributed to improving the automation and stability of the Ansible Runner tool. Their work included fixing bugs related to Unicode handling, optimizing event processing for different job types, and enhancing error handling within the execution environment. They also focused on improving the build and release process, including setting safer permissions for file creation and directory creation. The user's contributions demonstrate a strong focus on operational aspects and streamlining the tool's functionality.
THIS TOOL IS NO LONGER UNDER ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT. This tool is being phased out in favor of the new official AWX CLI
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:38 commits, 20 PRs, 9 pushes in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Ryan contributed to the `tower-cli` repository by modifying the setting resource to support category filtering and value coercion, enhancing the usability of the CLI. They also worked on improving the modification process, implementing change detection and handling of encrypted values. Furthermore, the user addressed build and packaging concerns related to `pip install -e .` and fixed flake8 warnings.
towerawxcli
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